Tuesday, October 27, 2009

This blog has certainly been all over the map of late: First I talked about doing a homebrew, then I started up a Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign at the behest of my players, and now I'm back to doing a homebrew. A few weeks ago I complained that CC3 took too long to generate a map in and was looking at other hexmappers, and now I'm back to using CC3. It's been very schizophrenic, to say the least.

A lot of it has to do with the group dynamic that I hinted at in my "Drama" post a few weeks ago. The request by my players that I run KoK again had a lot to do with the desire of some to get into a deeply political campaign, and they knew how well that particular setting lent itself to that kind of game. This proved to be an enormous frustration to me since it was my desire to get into an old-school exploration game, and as I noted was a great frustration to my wife and daughter as well.

Going back to a homebrew world is honestly the desire of my heart and seems the natural extension of getting back to my roots: A small but wide-open area with only a few human outposts but lots of ruins, lost cities, dangerous terrain, and fell creatures to contend with. It also avoids the urge to overload my players with too much information up front. But that doesn't mean that everything I worked up for KoK is going to waste. Oh, no. As I said back in "Green World Design," "All authors, whether professional or amateur, steal from someone. Might as well start burglarizing my own home." Except that I'm going to plunder a bit from Kalamar as well.

After all, there's no need to waste the material that I ran up for Religion on the Frontier; I'll just transplant it. Ditto the material that I worked up for the secondary campaign base, Daruk; it's now fleshing out Raven's Gate, my own little City on the Borderlands. The rough outlines of the world and its lands are already there in my Recycling Redux post.

Game tonight; I need to find more material to cannibalize for my Shrine of the Cat. Maybe something involving actual cannibals.

Monday, October 26, 2009

James over at Grognardia has complained about not liking mapping all that much. I have to admit that I feel exactly the opposite. I love mapping. In fact, I have whole notebooks filled with maps that I've never used for anything, but just made for the fun of it. I do a lot of cannibalism, stealing names I like from unused maps and reusing them in others.

To the left is my current campaign map, still in progress, rendered in Campaign Cartographer 3. Yeah, I know a few months ago I complained that it took too long to render a map in it, but I ended up catching the bug again and working up the above. It's a different style than I'm used to using for the program, one that doesn't try to close the space between the trees and has a bit more emphasis on contour lines than I have in the past (having been impressed with their use by the Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas). For reference, here's a map of a kingdom in my original campaign world, Newoldearth:

As you can see, I put a little too much emphasis on trying to give it a "finished product" look while still trying to show the hills among the forests. The result is disjointed and, frankly, far less amenable to attempts to update it by, for example, inserting a vale into the mountains or a ruin into the woods.

Sometimes we just need a fresh start. I knew it was time for me when I found myself more and more wanting to map something fresh, something where I could be surprised by what was over the next hill, something that didn't have a bad case of canon lock-out for new players. Right now, Asryth is that world for me, because I don't have a clue about its history beyond vague outlines of the last two hundred years. Pretty much all I have is one map showing an area about 200 miles across.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Well, with the bulk of the group currently out, I've been playing with my wife and daughter, running them through the ever classic (B1) Keep on the Borderlands. Our sessions have been short due to our daughter's bedtime, but fun nevertheless.

Shamayim the shamaness, Kitty Crystal the elven warrior-mage, and Joshua the fighting man met by chance in the free city of Daruk, called the City of Brass by some. Hearing rumors about a humanoid-infested collection of caves somewhere to the west, they decided to try to win their fortunes.

In the first session, they entered the goblin caves, headed right (west) and ran into the goblin guards adjacent to the ogre. They managed to kill most of the guards, but Joshua was severely wounded before the ogre even showed up. Kitty (my daughter's character, if you couldn't guess) ran after the goblins who escaped through the secret door in back just in time to see the ogre stand up. As already noted, she tried to attack the ogre and got in a pair of thin scratches before her character's meat was properly tenderized for the cooking pot by the ogre's club.

In the second session, Shamayim and Joshua finished recovering in town and set out to hire some additional help to go back to the caves. They recruited Leah Kitty, another elven warrior-mage and hired a pair of freeswords (or rather, a freesword and a freemace) named Frejar and Brennan. The five opted to avoid the goblin caves with the friendly ogre, opting instead to try a cave on the opposite end of the valley.

Entering the cave, they traveled thirty feet before their front two ranks, including the two hirelings and Leah, fell into a pit trap, taking a battering in the process. Immediately, six reptilian dogmen (kobolds) appeared from a nearby alcove and attacked them. Josh leapt across the pit and fell too with his sword while Shamayim lowered a rope to their trapped companions. By the time they were out, the whole party had taken serious wounds, with just about everyone down to one or two hit points, but they nevertheless carried the day and managed to keep any of the kobolds from escaping to warn their kin.

In session three, having found but a few coppers on the bodies of the kobolds, the party took their remaining shields and spears to better equip the hirelings and took off down the left hand corridor, lighting torches to see. They found a room filled with trash and rubble--and eighteen giant rats led by a rat the size of a wolf that wore a silver chain set with gems.

At this point, the shaman needs to be explained. It's a subclass of the cleric, based on the 3.5 ed Kingdoms of Kalamar variant. Among its class abilities, rather than turning or controlling undead, the shaman can turn and control animals. The shaman succeeded in her turn check (aided by the rats' low hit die) and managed to get control of all eighteen. Shamayim started to take the larger rat's necklace, but noticed that her control started to slip (it actually tried to bite her), so ended up returning it. They searched the room before backtracking and wandering deeper into the kobold caves.

They found the kobolds' storage room, but made sufficient noise (Shamayim screamed when they discovered a human arm in the meat supply) that a pair of the kobold chieftain's bodyguards came to investigate. Leah slew one, but the other managed to kill Brennan and make a break for it. The party took off in pursuit and encountered the third guard and the chieftain, who came to support their comrade. Shamayim summoned her new rat friends, who made short work of all three and the chieftain's women. The largest rat bowed to Shamayim before returning with his fellows into the darkness of the cave. They searched the room quickly, found the chieftain's golden necklace, his treasure chest, and a few other coins, and then made haste to the exit.

End result: 1280 gp worth of treasure, split among three PCs (320 gp each), one hireling (160 gp) and one dead hireling's wife and children (160 gp, enough to keep them comfortably for a good few years if they're careful). The party members got about 50 xp for the monsters each, but since xp is principally awarded by spending gold rather than finding it, I won't know how much closer each PC is to their next level until they report their intra-adventure expenditures.

All things considered, a pretty good collection of adventures. Hopefully they'll continue to be fun for all involved and hopefully some more of my regulars will start showing up again.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

I ran another game for my wife and daughter today. We're still doing the ol' B2: Keep on the Borderlands. My brother wasn't there, but they went in with his character anyway (a bit unorthodox, but he wouldn't have minded, I happen to know). They picked Cave D: the Goblin Lair and started working their way through. I used dungeon tiles to illustrate the terrain for them and they soon ran into the goblins adjacent to the ogre's cave. Mistakes were made, hilarity ensued.

The fighter went down on the second round (at exactly zero hit points, I ruled he wasn't dead, but stunned and out of the fight), but not before taking a goblin with him. The little one used her burning hands spell, but a bit too late for best effect. Meanwhile, they didn't even try to stop the goblin running for the back corner of the room, nor did they decide to break things off when he disappeared into the secret door. Instead, they managed to finish wiping out four of the five remaining goblins, the fifth running after his buddy.

My daughter took off in hot pursuit, arriving just in time to see the goblins bribing the ogre next door for help. "I'll attack him!" she announced.

"Are you sure?" I asked, describing again the 10' monster with the giant club.

"Yeah!" she said.

After that, there was nothing for it but to let the die roll where they may. She managed to draw blood through a couple of scratches on its thick hide before he whalloped her with his club. My wife's character, a shaman, high-tailed it out of there with the fighter with sound of a meat hammer slamming against a rack of ribs until the bones cracked ringing in her ears.

My daughter was upset at losing, but listened to me as I explained to her why it was sometimes better to run than fight before heading off to bed. We're going to roll up her new character tomorrow, possibly a sister or cousin of the dead one bent on getting her vengeance.

I started on this post before the drama mentioned last post kicked-in, so some of the details aren't immediately relevant to my campaign anymore. Even so, the overall

Just on a lark, I did some poking around a couple of weekends ago to see what sort of gaming software I could find on the web and I came across a little piece called RPG Manager and another called Hexographer, both of which can be used to make hex-based maps. I saw some potential in both for my own campaign.

As I played with the programs, I found myself recreating the maps from the Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas in hex form, using a 6-mile hex as my scale. I found myself surprisingly delighted with the results. I haven't used a hex map as the basis for a D&D game since . . . well, almost ever. I used the more easily obtainable graph and plain white paper in my younger years and Campaign Cartographer since my 20s. The latter made beautiful maps and was fairly easy to scale, but was time-consuming to use. Nevertheless, I remained far away from hex maps for years.

Recently, I came across my old JG stuff and had some fun going back through it. While it didn't sell me on the wisdom of the hex entirely, I did like the way it enabled sandbox play, since one could simply set up the contents of each hex and assume that if the party passed through it, they had a good chance of encountering whatever was there. Some have decried this as unrealistic, but it serves a useful purpose: It gives the party a basic unit of exploration in the wilderness, just as the 10' square does in the dungeon. Few referees would force the players to describe the area they are searching down to the square inch; rather, we rule that it takes a turn to search a 10'x10' area. In the same way, while it may be realistic to have the party miss the entreance to the dungeon by a mere hundred feet in a forest, it's bound to lead to frustration and styme exploration.

Of course, not everything in a 6-mile hex (an area encompasing approximately 20 square miles) need be seen the instant a party enters it. A lot depends on the type of terrain, how big the object (or creature) is, whether it was built on a hill (as most human fortresses are) or hidden in a cave, whether the area's paths (whether paved roads or just the easiest way to traverse its contours) pass near it, etc. There are too many factors to create a table that would cover all situations, so the referee will need to make a ruling based on his best estimate of the object's size, form, and prominence.

To give an example of how this works in actual play, let me share some highlights from this last week's game: The party, following up on rumors of Dejy raiders wearing palid masks, decide to seek them out in a nearby wood. The first day, they left late, traveled a hex through clear terrain and two hexes into the woods. A random encounter showed a result of a "wreck" of some sort, so I ruled that the players found a crude cart at the bottom of a ravine. One player asked if there was any sort of trail. I said there was (common sense dictating that a cart needs a trail to go far in heavy woods) and the party followed it along the ridge of the hills that lay to the south.

They encountered nothing of note the second day, but on the third day, a random roll indicated a band of cultists. Fortunately, the party's thief, scouting ahead, won the surprise roll and was able to hide before they noticed him. The cultists were turning on another trail leading to the south and, as it turns out, up the slope towards the monestary of St. Gaxyg. At that point, the party is outnumbered and decides to avoid a confrontation, instead taking shelter for the night in a nearby cave . . . which another random encounter indicated was the haunt of four dryads.

What tickled me is how well the hex-crawl worked with random tables. I simply created the encounter tables for the forest, including a "Ruins/Relics" result which directs me to a set of random tables drawn from the old JG Wilderlands sets. The existence of an actual trail through the woods all followed from a random cart on the road, and the path of the trail followed the contours of the land. The other encounters were equally random, with the imagination filling in the blanks. There's definitely something to be said for the Oracular Power of Dice.

Of course, not everything in the campaign is random. After all, I created specific encounter tables for the region in the first place, which gives a good idea of the local population distribution, and my map does include specific sites to visit. But by including that random element, I got a chance to be surprised, and being surprised is one of the greatest pleasures of a referee.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

It's been a while, but fortunately, not for lack of gaming. I've been busy working on a private wiki for my players where I've been posting many of my thoughts on the game and much of the work for the KoK campaign that I'm running.

It's no uncommon thing for gaming groups to break up, reform, and break up again, whether due to life's responsibilities or the social monster Ars Ludi warns us about. My own group has gone through one of its shortest cycles ever due to said monster, which reared up in a social/moral incompatibility that has forced at least one couple to leave the game and may have lost me another couple. If any of my players reads this blog, I'm not out to point fingers over that particular issue, but to point out something that I discovered almost immediately afterwards.

My wife and daughter are new to the role-playing thing. As was often the case with new players, it is sometimes difficult to get them comfortable in the group dynamic. Well, after the break-up, I sat down with them and my youngest brother and rolled some dice.

They loved it.

It turns out that what was keeping them silent for so much of the game was my group's--and one player in particular's--propensity to go for drama instead of adventure. It was a propensity that I was well aware of and was trying to nip in the bud with a West Marches-style sandbox, but nevertheless the old scene-chewing kept rearing its ugly head. It took six sessions and outright being ordered by a superior officer to even get the group to head towards my version of St. Gygax-at-Urheim, and they still haven't progressed into the tunnels beneath.

On the other hand, I set my family's new characters down in a free-city on the far side of the mysterious Duchy of O'Par, gave them a quick background and a few rumors, and they found the Caves of Chaos before the little one had to go to bed. We're going to do their first exploration of the Caves on Tuesday, hopefully with another friend or two's characters in tow.

And they loved it. No drama (or attempts thereof), no grandstanding, no complicated backgrounds that needed filling in, just two humans and an elf, coming to a backwater city on the very edge of civilization to find their fame and fortune and happily diving into the adventure without once turning to the director and asking, "So in this scene, what's my motivation?"

It occurs to me that maybe I've been trying to hard to play with the same group of friends for too long. There's an enormous pleasure in watching a group of neophytes attempt to navigate a module I was first introduced to some twenty-three years ago. I have several other potential players trying to work out their schedules to be able to come who are just as new to the game. D&D is a great avenue for drama, but its the sort of thing that one should be eased into after getting a chance to mow down some orcs, not have forced upon them in their first playing sessions.

You'd think I'd have had that figured out already. Sometimes you know something, but it still takes a little epiphany to make it really click.